The Character of George Washington
His time was employed in action chiefly, reading little, and that only in agriculture and English history.* His correspondence became necessarily extensive, and with journalizing his agricultural proceedings, occupied most of his leisure hours within doors.
On the whole his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in a few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more completely to make a man great, and to place him in the same constellation with whatever worthies have merited from man an everlasting remembrance. For his was the singular destiny and merit of leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war, for the establishment of its independence; of conducting its councils through the birth of a government, new in its forms and principles, until it had settled down into a quiet and orderly train.*
From Thomas Jefferson’s Letters and Addresses, edited (1908) by William B. Parker and Jonas Viles.
* He was not quite as uncultured as Jefferson might seem to imply. He took in a play when he could, and his reading was varied, including military histories from Julius Caesar to the Duke of Marlborough, and what we would now call ‘think-pieces’ in the Spectator of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Washington’s own library at Mount Vernon contained over nine hundred books on subjects such as agriculture, the military, history, politics, philosophy, and travel, as well as literature, plays and reference works. Some were foreign language titles, including French, Dutch and Latin.
* The US Government did not spring up overnight. The Declaration of Independence was made in 1776, and the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, but the Constitution was not drawn up until the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia between May 25th and September 17th, 1787. One of the Convention’s first acts was to elect Washington unanimously as President — a ringing endorsement none of his successors has enjoyed — but his term did not begin until he was inaugurated in New York (on Wall Street) on April 30th, 1789. The interim was necessary to “probe the defects of the Constitution to the bottom” so that the founders could “render the Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union”.